nomdeplume

Gotcha, but it doesn't technically attach the zone to a unit. For the most part that doesn't matter (since you can't actually see zones in the game), but for example if you explode a smoke marker within a zone that you're using with "unit in moving zone", then the marker will be created at the center of the zone's position in the mission editor, not at the location of the "attached" unit was at the last time the condition was checked.

Care to elaborate? Edit: the description in the GUI manual for the 'unit in moving zone' condition does indeed state that it "attaches" the trigger zone to the unit, so it may just be a matter of semantics.

You can't "attach" a zone to a unit. And it's not really any more complicated than having a trigger 'unit in zone'. All that changes is that you specify two units... which is exactly what you'd have to do to "attach" a zone to a unit, anyway.

It'd be a one second interval, actually. :) You can fairly easily set whatever interval you like using 'time since flag' and an additional flag. Just use 'switched condition' instead and toggle the flag whenever you want a new illumination bomb created.

I wouldn't say "incapable", but it's not what it's designed for - it should be effective against lightly armored targets though. Previously the CBU-97 was an over-powered -87. Currently (1.1.0.9) it's identical to the -87 (I think). They are working on modeling it more accurately and with much more detail; see this thread. I don't think any are especially useful against armor at the moment, so I'd stick with the PGMs or the gun. A dense pattern from a CBU might work well though (which is the default setting). Dropping them in pairs will probably also help. It affects the density of the explosions from the submunitions, which therefore affects the likelihood of enemies receiving damage, as well as the amount of damage they receive.

If it doesn't appear then it hasn't become active yet, or it doesn't have a valid callsign/frequency to be active on. It sounds like you're using your own custom mission for this? If so, you might want to create a thread in the mission builder's subforum and attach your mission. There's also a thread there "Predator as JTAC" that you might want to read through first - might give you a nudge in the right direction.

Unless you do actually want to allow them to engage in certain circumstances.

404 == "Not found" HTTP response code.

I don't think you can do anything particularly useful in terms of player AFAC for single-player, since there's no way for the player to get an AI flight to engage a particular target. You could of course give the player 3 wingmen and have them act as FAC for them, but it's not quite the same. One concept would be to add an option to the radio menu whenever the player detects a group of enemies. However, working out when the player detected them is pretty much impossible, AFAIK. So, that would basically just end up giving the player a menu of all the enemy groups. It might work okay if you can reasonably spin the idea that all enemy positions are known and the player's role is to prosecute the targets in the correct order depending on circumstances. The other workable alternative would be if you have a situation where enemies appear from known/expected locations. You could then have the player task AI flights to engage targets within one of those areas. But you'd still be dependent on the AI spotting the targets and deciding to engage them. Anyway, to directly answer your question, yes you can IR mark targets using the targeting pod (it has both a laser and an IR pointer). However AI flights won't respond to your marking in any way, so it's useless in SP except to help you locate your own target. Same deal with WP rockets.

You can also use the unit ai enable/disable to good effect with some of the SAM systems, particularly if they have a separate search and tracking radars. If you disable the unit AI for the tracking radar, the search radar will still ping you, but they won't be able to launch on you. You can of course use the trigger zone method NPOSuperhornet suggested to enable the tracking radar if they stray too close. You might also get good results by disabling the unit ai for the launchers themselves. Not sure if I've actually tried that, though. In theory it might mean they track you but won't actually launch anything.

The reason it's different is because the Nevada map was a product feature at the time the pre-order was made available. When that feature was withdrawn (so it could be further developed), some people quite reasonably felt like they'd been mislead. So, ED/TFC made the best compromise they could: that feature wouldn't be available when the game was released, but people who'd pre-ordered the game while that was listed as a feature would receive it for free once it was finished. And, it'd be better than the originally planned version of that feature. So, that's a pretty good deal, really. People who bought the game after the release weren't told there'd be a Nevada map included with the product, so there wasn't that expectation in the first place, and it didn't factor into their decision to buy the product at the asking price. And as a business decision, ED/TFC have decided they think the new and improved Nevada theatre is good enough to charge for, so they're selling it.

Nope, there's smoke generators available in the loadout menu which come in multiple colours, but they're for looking cool when you do aerobatics. You can also create coloured smoke markers using triggers. The aircraft can only be loaded with white phosphorous rockets. Since JTAC doesn't actually fire rockets, it probably uses the same functionality as the 'smoke marker' trigger action. If that's the case then the colour is probably specified within the JTAC script/code.

The sim requires activation even for single-player. I don't have any reason to believe the boxed copy has a different copy-protection mechanism; what you get on the disk is essentially what you download from the website. The only difference between burning the downloaded files to a disc yourself and buying it in a box is the artwork on the box and the disc. Well, that and you have to wait longer. :) Many people don't like to receive things with serial numbers second-hand, since you don't know if the other person is no longer using it or if it has any activations left. Also, although I can't check the EULA at the moment, I'm pretty sure you're actually buying a license to use a copy of the program, and you don't have the right to sell or otherwise transfer that license. The setup files can be downloaded (and run) without a serial number (or even an account on the website). To play the game though, you need to activate it -- what you're buying is the serial number and associated license. Anyway, you're welcome to continue to prefer buying boxed software; lots of people do, which is why ED go to the trouble to make it available in that form. Just don't kid yourself you're getting anything more than some pretty packaging to put on a shelf. That might be the case with some other games, but I don't think it is here. It's just another distribution method.

I think the most important point is that when you buy a game, only a small part of what you pay goes to covering the costs of distribution. The majority of the price is there to recoup development costs with enough profit that they can afford to spend years making the next game. That cost doesn't change if it's delivered on printed discs in shops or via download. Additionally, charging different prices at different places risks alienating particular retailers. Even big companies probably don't feel safe doing that, and for niche genres it's probably even more important to have as many sales channels as you can get. Someone correct me if I'm wrong, but the boxed version of the game probably uses the same copy protection as the download version. So in your nightmare scenario of ED/the company managing the licensing server deciding not to support the product anymore and ED not releasing a patch to remove the copy protection, having a physical product won't change anything. One other point: if you buy a shiny pressed disc, you form an attachment to that particular disc (since it's your original copy). Unless ED never patches the game after the boxed version is released in your country, the content of that disc will become outdated. A rational person could just burn a copy of the new one and discard the outdated one, but you won't be able to be rational about it because you have an attachment to that particular disc. You'll be doomed to drag it through your entire life, even when the data on it is so outdated that you'll never use it again.

It's the same as the difference between locking a target with the TGP, and making the TGP the SPI. If you release a guided bomb it won't hit the target your TGP is tracking, it'll hit your SPI. If you follow steering cues to your SPI, you won't find yourself at the target location, etc. If you hook an object on the TAD, then you'll get some cues on your HUD to help you find it, and the ability to create a waypoint from it, but your SPI will remain whatever it was previously (TGP, STPT, or whatever). If you make the TAD your SPI generator, then whatever you have hooked will be your SPI. Also, you can't make the TAD your SPI without hooking something, since having an object hooked is the only way for it to generate a position.

Depends how big the price gap is -- it can't hurt to get the newer one in terms of future support etc. I have both and didn't notice any significant differences when I upgraded to the 5. I think it is a little bit better, but TIR 4 is already well within "good enough" territory. TIR 5 might handle less-ideal conditions (glare etc.) better, but I think most of that optimisation is in the software and the new software supports the v4 hardware.

Actually finished aligning == INS NAV RDY message is flashing on the display. The message will appear when the system has achieved a minimal level of accuracy, but it will continue to refine for four minutes, and the INS NAV RDY text will start flashing/blinking. At that point you can put it into NAV mode and start on your journey. If you are waiting for the full alignment to occur, you may need to just make a bit of a turn to get the GBUs to align properly - I think 90 degrees is sufficient and it doesn't need to be sharp or anything. But normally you'd do enough maneuvering on the way to the target to cover it.

A work colleague just emailed this around:

The system is warning you that you're lucky to fly into the blast/debris from the bombs you're about to drop. This is because you haven't set an escape maneuver in the profile (using the "SEM" OSB), so the system assumes you're just going to keep on flying straight into it. See page 535 of the flight manual for very little in the way of description.

There's four sensors - you forgot MAV. And to set the HUD as SOI it's a short press, not long. I think coolie hat up long is one of the quick-look options to bring up the DSMS or somesuch.

The game won't automatically change your conditions as that would result in unpredictable and weird behaviour. So no, if there's less than 8 players that trigger's conditions can never be satisfied. You might want to experiment with the flag increment and flag decrement actions - each time a player spawns, increment a flag, and decrement it when they die (you can probably just use a pair of unit alive/unit dead switched conditions for each aircraft for this). That way you can always know how many clients are active in the mission. Then, you can assign a flag for each client aircraft to indicate if it's present in the zone (and for our purposes, "does not exist" is the same as "present in the zone"). You could put that as an additional action in the alive/dead dead triggers - when the player dies/disconnects, set the flag to true (to pretend they're in the zone). When the player is alive (spawned), set the flag to false. Then have a separate trigger for each client to set their flag true when they enter the zone. Finally, your actual activation will be checking to see if a) there's more than X clients in the game and b) all of the per-client flags are set. So at the start of the mission, there's nobody connected, so the 'player count' flag is 0, and all the 'client in zone' flags are true. The player count check will stop the trigger from activating before anyone's in the game. Then when the first client spawns, the 'player count' flag will be incremented to 1, but that client's flag will be cleared - so it still won't activate. Then if that client flies into the zone, their flag will be set, and the trigger will activate. If you want to ensure there's at least two players before it activates, you can just change the condition for that flag. Hope that makes sense...

I just tried with an all-LGB loadout (both types) and no TGP, and wasn't able to get them to drop. CCIP or CCRP. I even changed the release profile from optimal to ballistic and that made no difference. In CCRP mode, as the release thingy passes through the other thingy while you're holding the weapon release button, the HUD symbology flashes like it does for a release, but the bomb doesn't actually drop. I don't know if it's intentional that the require a TGP to be equipped to be dropped, but it definitely appears to be the case that they do. Edit: I started from the air with all systems on and no other weapons (to rule out possibility of a conflict between different weapon types, like the Maverick CCRP bug). I also tried turning the TGP switch on in case it was linked to that, but that made no difference. With air starts your master on and gun arm are both on to start with, but I did test-fire the gun just to be sure.

Yes it's just plug and play, the sim recognises the controllers and automatically configures everything. The only thing you may need to change is that the trim hat is, by default, used to control your view, and you need to hold RightCtrl (or something) when using it to actually control trim. If you have TrackIR or otherwise don't want to use a joystick hat to control your view, then you'll need to remove the modifier from the trim hat. Dunno, I used the calibration tool when I first got it to ensure it was properly calibrated, and haven't thought about it since. Then again, I don't recall ever recalibrating my X52, either.

Hi, I haven't run the mission but I quickly opened it in 7-zip and I can see the DSMS (and other) folders there which implies you have actually used the prepare mission function, even if you don't remember doing so. :) If you follow the instructions in those other posts to open the .miz zipfile up and delete everything except the 'mission' and 'options' files, the problem will disappear.

Nope it's not, prepare mission is accessed from the menubar at the top of the screen. Upload the mission and/or a track from it when you can.